Dr. Martin J. Williams
Government has been urged to complete all projects started in 2011 in the all Metropolitan, Municipal and Districts Assemblies (MMDAs).
Dr. Martin J. Williams, an associate professor in public management at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford gave the advice at a day’s workshop organised by the World Bank yesterday in Accra themed, “Combining geo-spatial data and survey to study regional inequality in Ghana.”
“Out of the many projects initiated in the country, one out of every three projects started never got completed.
According to him, a research he conducted on government projects in Ghana revealed that an average of unfinished projects in Ghana had 65% physical completion, 56% of contract sum disbursed, 18.6% of MMDA investment expended and were unlikely to ever be finished.
His research covered over 14,000 small development projects in Ghana.
Dr. Williams said that the inability to complete the projects can be attributed to politics and corruption.
He added that to tackle the issue, the government must adopt a large administrative database to track all uncompleted projects in each district, their unit costs and value for money.
“In the long term, having an efficient database would be useful if most of these projects are mapped and easily located to enhance monitoring, technical and organizational systems for sustainability, and this would make Ghana the first country in the sub-region with such a database and platform.”
By Charles Cheku Armah & Nii Adjei Fio